In Play, Joseph Havel

Gracing the Great Lawn in front of the Anderson-Clarke Center is Joseph Havel's installation "In Play." The bronze sculptures are in dialogue in two groupings; one on the southwest corner and the other on the northeast corner of the lawn. They convey a lightness in their positioning, appearing to hover over the grass as if they could be easily nudged or rolled. In Play invites intimate inspection, contemplation, and a re-thinking of the ideas sculpture can communicate.

In Play, Joseph Havel

Gracing the Great Lawn in front of the Anderson-Clarke Center is Joseph Havel's installation "In Play." The bronze sculptures are in dialogue in two groupings; one on the southwest corner and the other on the northeast corner of the lawn. They convey a lightness in their positioning, appearing to hover over the grass as if they could be easily nudged or rolled. In Play invites intimate inspection, contemplation, and a re-thinking of the ideas sculpture can communicate.

In Play, Joseph Havel

Gracing the Great Lawn in front of the Anderson-Clarke Center is Joseph Havel's installation "In Play." The bronze sculptures are in dialogue in two groupings; one on the southwest corner and the other on the northeast corner of the lawn. They convey a lightness in their positioning, appearing to hover over the grass as if they could be easily nudged or rolled. In Play invites intimate inspection, contemplation, and a re-thinking of the ideas sculpture can communicate.

This activity guide is our attempt to work with our colleagues across the city who are just beginning to welcome preschoolers and kindergarteners back into their classrooms. None of us really know what we will find as the children return to us, but when we talk it through, we realize that our backgrounds as early childhood educators have prepared us to support them. Please share this document with your teaching team, your leadership teams and your fellow educators as we begin to help children recover from the traumatic experiences associated with Harvey.

While the central charge of School Literacy and Culture is to extrapolate current early education research into classroom practice, we do at times conduct original research as well. The nationally recognized peer-review study highlighted here found that children in storytelling classrooms made greater gains on standardized measures of early literacy than peers in control classrooms.

The current study was designed to assess the vocabulary and literacy skills of young children who participated in an authentic literacy practice, i.e., Vivian Paley's “storytelling curriculum,” over the course of their respective prekindergarten or kindergarten years. We asked: How do prekindergarten and kindergarten age children, who participate in the storytelling curriculum over the course of the school year, perform on pre- and postmeasures of AGS/Pearson Assessments' Expressive Vocabulary Test (EVT), the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) (3rd ed.) Form IIIA, and Whitehurst's Get Ready to Read!, as compared to those young children in the same grade with similar backgrounds and in the same or similar school settings who did not participate in the storytelling curriculum? Results show that in comparison to same-age children in like settings, participants in the storytelling curriculum showed significant gains in both vocabulary knowledge and literacy skills. These findings underscore the possibility of supporting both beginning and experienced teachers in using authentic literacy activities to prepare children for literacy learning, while maintaining their service to a wide range of other developmental issues. They also call into question the prevailing trend to abandon such classroom practices in favor of a skills-centered approach to curriculum.

Our blog serves a repository of resources for parents, teachers and anyone else interested in early childhood literacy. We regularly post stories that highlight contemporary practices, easy activities for home and classroom, scholarly articles and much more.

In light of the 2008 Revised Pre-kindergarten Guidelines, the 2012 Revised Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Kindergarten, and the increasing need to support all classroom activities with evidence of standards, School Literacy and Culture created the following documents. These documents are designed to assist teachers and school leaders in understanding the educational impact of many of SLC’s widely known activities on students’ learning as described in the Pre-Kindergarten Guidelines and the English Language Arts and Reading Kindergarten TEKS. For each document there is an “Activities to Standards Correlation” section which describes each SLC activity or practice and associates it with a Texas education standard. There is also the “Standards to Activities Correlation” section which lists the standards and all the related School Literacy and Culture activities or practices that can be used to meet each standard.